13. Paperwork
PAPERWORK
GHOST
The desert at a hundred and ten was a tunnel with no walls.
The cold came in flat across my throat. My headlight threw a white hole down the road and the black ate it back up on either side, Blade's light steady in my mirror.
No traffic. No cops. The city came up as a smear of orange lights on the sky, then the long lit spine of Charleston, and I ran every blurred light with my head doing the one thing I'd told it not to, which was show me pictures.
A gurney. A van with blacked windows. Liam, who'd squeezed a finger twice this week, strapped to a board and rolled into the dark by two men in uniforms nobody had checked while they held papers that seemed official, but were not.
And Caleb asleep in my bed, thirteen miles away, not knowing what was happening to his brother.
We came into the entrance of the back parking structure, engines off, coasting, and Vega stepped out from behind a pillar at the foot of the ramp with a hand up, barely visible in the dark.
"Second level!" Low, fast, his eyes wide and moving. "The van hasn't moved. The two went inside twenty minutes ago. Santos and Valkyrie are up there."
"Show me." My voice came out even. My hand was already inside my jacket, on the Glock.
We went up the stairwell, cold concrete and pine cleaner. The second level opened flat and wide, half full of cars with dew on their roofs. Santos and Valkyrie were crouched behind a pickup at the far end, and we hurried toward them.
The van sat forty feet past them. White. Cargo. Blacked windows, a magnetic logo peeling at one corner. I looked up, and I saw why it was parked there.
"Cameras." I got low beside Santos. "Every fifty feet along the beams."
"And the van's in the one spot none of them can see." Santos didn't move his eyes off the van. "Clocked that twenty minutes ago, when they pulled in. Somebody walked this level in daylight and picked it."
Which meant whatever happened in that spot wasn't going to be on any screen.
Valkyrie was on his other side. Even crouched she was a lot of woman, a couple of inches taller than me standing, with shoulders that had been built hauling on a ranch before Blade tore the place open and brought her out with the rest. Hair pulled back tight in a ponytail.
Hands flat and still on her thighs. "Two in the van.
Maybe three. Can't see through the glass. "
"Anybody seen you?" Blade, from behind me.
"Nobody came to look." Her eyes never left the van. "They think they're the only ones awake."
Boots hit the stairwell behind us. Hard soles on concrete, two sets climbing fast, the sound coming up the well and spreading across the level the way sound did in a place built to hold cars. My hand tightened on the Glock. Nobody of ours walked like they owned the building.
We went flat behind the tailgate and two men came up onto the level in white uniform shirts, walking fast, the one in front talking over his shoulder.
"—finally gave in. She's calling the floor. Get the gurney out and get the van around to the bay before somebody up there changes their mind."
Under my breath, so low nobody caught it: "Thank you."
Whoever she was, she'd looked at paperwork that checked and hadn't liked it, and she'd bought us twenty minutes with a slow hand and a phone. Anything less, and we'd be riding into an empty structure right now.
The van's side door rolled open. Three more climbed out, big, loose-shouldered, one cracking his neck, and the five of them stood in the dead ground between the pillars around a gurney with straps on it.
Five.
Something in me had been going hot and tight since Vega said the word transfer, and now, looking at that gurney, it went very still.
Gravedigger had reached for Liam because Liam was the last handle he had on Caleb, and these five had been handed a sleeping man with a tube in his throat as a night's work, and every one of them had said yes.
They'd looked at those straps and said yes.
I thought about Caleb waking up in my bed in three hours to a phone call about an empty room on the second floor, and my hands closed on their own, and I let them.
Blade was already looking at me. I looked at Santos, at Vega, at Valkyrie, and every one of them gave me the same small nod.
Blade went first. Blade never announced.
He went around the pickup at a walk that became something else with no gear between, and the nearest uniform didn't hear him until it was too late.
Blade's forearm took him across the throat and drove him into the van with a boom that shook the whole panel. Blade leaned his weight into it and held him there.
The other uniform was mine. He'd turned at the boom and his hands were up before his eyes found me, which told me everything. Trained. Feet under him. A jab came at my face and I wasn't in it.
The three from the van came off the gurney at once.
Santos met the first with his fists up. Vega tackled the second head-on and I heard the impact of it from fifteen feet.
Valkyrie went for the third and he was faster than she'd read.
His front kick took her square in the stomach, all his weight behind the ball of his foot, and it folded her and sent her stumbling back three steps into a pillar with the air leaving her in one sound.
Everything in me went toward her. One of ours, hit first, hit hard, by a man who'd come here to strap a sleeping kid to a board.
But I couldn't help. My man was on me, and if I turned my back to help her I'd have his fist in my spine, and I hated every half second I spent slipping punches while she was bent over that pillar hunting for her breath.
My man threw a hook. I slipped it. A cross behind it, and I turned it off my forearm, the jolt running up into my shoulder, and gave him a heel to the inside of the knee on the way past. He staggered.
Came again. A boxer's hands, and behind them a face going red because he'd thrown four and landed nothing.
"Stop fucking moving, you brat!" Spit flew with it.
"You came for a man who can't move." I wasn't where he'd aimed. "Try one who can."
Left of me, the uniform against the van dropped his chin, got both hands on Blade's pinning arm, turned his hips and planted a knee in the middle of Blade's chest that sent him two steps back.
Then they were trading blows. Hands up, both of them, fists and kicks going both ways.
Blade's shin slammed into the man's thigh, and the man took the hit without complaint.
The man went with a straight right that caught Blade full on the cheekbone, Blade eating it and answering with an elbow that opened the man's eyebrow like a zipper.
Santos was bleeding from his lip. Vega had blood running from his nose down over his chin, but he was still swinging.
Valkyrie had come off the pillar and the man who'd kicked her was on her again. I saw what he was between one slip and the next. Muay Thai.
Elbows, knees, shins, fists, all of it coming in combinations, his hands on the back of her neck for half a second and a knee driving up into her body before she tore free.
She was landing hits too. A boot into his thigh that would've dropped a smaller man, a fist that turned his head. But he was landing more.
Every one of them was trained. Pit fighters, the men Caleb had told us about at the war table.
They were carrying, too. I'd seen the print of a pistol under the first uniform's shirt when Blade folded him against the van, and I'd seen him ignore it, because a man who'd won with his hands trusted his hands more than steel.
But they fought alone.
Five men and not one of them looked at another. Each had his fight and stayed in it, head down, like there was nobody on that concrete but the Phoenix in front of him.
We didn't fight like that.
I dodged an uppercut from the boxer when I saw Valkyrie move to get outside her enemy's next elbow, her feet going right, and the space opened up behind her and I saw the whole thing at once, the way my head saw a room.
My boxer threw another right. I slipped it going forward instead of back, and my fist was already on its way, short and fast, straight into the point of his chin. His head turned with it and his whole body turned with his head, and I was gone before he finished turning.
"Valkyrie!" I was running. "Duck!!"
She went down without a question, folding at the waist, both hands flat on the concrete, and the man who'd kicked her was already coming for her fast, kick loading for the finish.
Her back was my step. My boot hit her shoulder blades and I went up and over her, out and forward into the air with a knee up in front of me. The last thing I saw before I hit him was his eyes going wide.
My knee landed square in his face.
His head snapped back. His legs kept going forward without him, all his weight thrown the wrong way at once, and he went over backward and landed flat across his upper back on the concrete with a sound I felt in my own spine.
I came down rolling over my right shoulder, came up on my feet, and I turned fast to see what I'd left behind me.
The Muay Thai guy was out cold. Flat on his back, arms wide, blood already running from his nose down both sides of his face.
Valkyrie didn't stop to look at him. She was up and moving before I'd finished turning, straight across the concrete toward Vega, who needed her most. Past her, Blade had his man going backward, slipping a kick and answering it in the same half second, a hook to the body and a cross behind it that put the man's back into the side of the van hard enough to rock it on its springs.
Then Valkyrie screamed.
I'd never heard a human being make a sound like it. It tore up out of her from somewhere below her stomach, hit the concrete and the beams, and came back doubled. A war cry under a concrete ceiling. Every head on that level turned toward it, including the head of the man in front of Vega.